Gifts and gore

IT’S not easy being a general these days. Where do you find a good supply of
impressionable warrior recruits fit for all those looming high-tech wars? The
British army apparently thinks ex-cons might fill the gap. Strange, when they
could be recruiting in cyber cafes instead. After all, more people play world
domination in Command & Conquer online than are serving in Her
Majesty’s armed forces.

But you don’t have to make the military part of your career plan to play the
games: they are getting better, brighter and bigger. Tiberian Sun
(Electronic Arts, £29.99), the third instalment of the Command &
Conquer series, has grossed more than Hollywood blockbusters such as
Godzilla and Deep Impact. Its popularity has enabled its creators
to enlist the talents of actors such as James Earl Jones for the cut-scenes,
those film clips crucial in creating its atmosphere. You then scramble for
resources in a fight for world domination either as UN Security Forces or
shadowy terrorists. It’s a perfect gift for armchair generals or would-be James
Bonds.

That atmosphere and gameplay are crucial is highlighted by their absence in
some of the games available for the new Dreamcast console (£199), Sega’s
bid to recover the share of the home games market it lost to Sony’s Playstation.
The Dreamcast sounds great: a games machine that opens the doors to online
gaming. It’s clearly the way to go: leave that clunky desktop computer in the
office and just take home the icing on the cake—a built-in modem, Web
browser and e-mail on a 128-bit console.

But do the games benefit from a processor four times more powerful than the
Playstation’s? Sadly, the answer has to be not yet. Incoming (Rage
Software, £31.95) is a 3D version of Space Invaders with neither
the plot depth of Command & Conquer nor the atmosphere of Alien
versus Predator. Sega Rally 2 (Sega, £39.50) lacks the
real-life feel of racing car simulators on more primitive platforms, and looks
like a hurried attempt to round out the Dreamcast’s portfolio.

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In spite of that, you’ll be hard to put to resist the notion that this is the
techie present of Christmas 1999—bad news for the cash-strapped. But you
could retreat into nostalgia instead. You can recapture the magic of those first
primitive computer games by transforming your PC or Mac into the Atari,
Commodore or Nintendo. Many emulator programs are available online: the
Commodore 64, for instance, is resurrected at www.ozemail.com.au/~gvincent.

Back to the modern world, try a lesson in fear: Alien versus
Predator (£28.99) drips with atmosphere, not to mention acid blood.
The familiar sounds of the Predator’s shoulder cannon or its infrared vision
mode, as well as the desperate bursts from the marines’ pulse rifles, will
transport you into a very familiar—and very scary—place. Networking
gives an added dose of reality. Between hearts skipping a beat and the sound of
the proximity detector pulsating, movie fans will be overwhelmed with nostalgia.
The ultimate shoot-out game.

Calm down with the latest Creatures, the artificial life game whose
innovative technology attracted the interest of the military (New
Scientist, 8 May 1998, p 38). In the spirit of 1999, Creatures 3
(Cyberlife, £27) is a prequel, set a thousand years before the last
version. As before, you kick-start evolution by creating a population of little
creatures called norns, then shepherd them through ecological disasters.

Set in a gigantic spacecraft with many different ecosystems, your loveable
norns can explore even more realistic worlds than before. Now the surroundings
are littered with fun gadgets, and a newly found sense of smell, along with
enhanced intelligence and sense of direction, makes your norns easier to handle.
Creatures 3 also allows you to start with a bunch of pretrained norns,
a definite bonus for those who could never keep them alive long enough to breed.
One for a gentle minded player, or a biologist.

Staying alive isn’t make or break as far as The Nomad Soul (Eidos,
£29.99) goes. You agree to let your soul occupy the body of a character
from Omikron, a world in another dimension. The twist is that if you come to an
untimely end, you don’t have go back to your last save and try again. Instead,
your soul passes into the body of the first person who touches your corpse.

The Nomad Soul makes use of what the developers Quantic Dreams refer
to as the “intelligent adventure manager”, dispensing with the need for a single
solution to each problem. The underlying plot is the usual action adventure
nonsense about unleashed demons, but is still highly original. It comes with a
soundtrack by David Bowie and Reeves Gabrels plus cameo appearances from Bowie
and Iman. It will suit seasoned game players and near-novices alike. Mind you,
that’s if you get a version that runs. The first set of discs not only failed to
run the whole game, but caused hardware glitches when uninstalled. Perhaps Eidos
will put a patch up on its site (www.eidos.com).

You should be out checking sites anyway, and not just for repairs. Here’s
where you can hone all those useful real-life skills: pattern recognition,
competition, cooperation and puzzle solving. There’s a rich choice of sites.
Easy to use is British Telecom’s Wireplay (www.wireplay.co.uk), which
supports more than a hundred online games. Its top ten embraces Aliens
versus Predator and, of course, a couple of versions of Quake.

The new kid on the block, so to speak, is Microsoft’s Zone.com. Part
of its attraction is its popularity. You’ll find 4266 players logged on to
Rainbow Six, for example. For general online gaming news, check outwww.futurenet.com/pcgamer. If you get stuck, try www.gamefaqs.com.
Here you’ll find an almost complete listing of hints and guides to most games,
going all the way back to defunct platforms. This could be the way to save money
at Christmas: giftwrap your URLs and playlists.